Monday 27 August 2018
Poetry in Advertising
After yesterday posting a video of Les Murray reading a beautiful poem about Australia for a Qantas advertisement, I remembered that another great poet had also got involved in the dark arts of the advertising world. The poet was Marianne Moore and in 1955 Ford, the car makers, asked her to help them choose a name for their latest model. The correspondence that followed can be read here. As much as the suggestions that Marianne Moore came up with, I like the whole tone of the letters to and fro - there is a gentle formality to them that I think is missing from most interchanges these days. It is a pity though that in the end the company did not choose any of Moore's suggestions. And actually, on second thoughts, it is mainly the suggestions I love, coming thicker and faster, increasingly conjured up, (I suspect), from a sense of the comedy of the venture. Is Mongoose Civique my all out favourite? I think, by a hair's breadth, perhaps it is.
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Something around forty years ago, there was an Edsel for sale at a gasoline station near us in the Denver suburbs. The price was such to make it possible to imagine buying it on what I earned at low-wage part-time jobs. It was also, as I did not reflect, low enough to make it improbable that I could afford to get it through inspection and keep it running. In any case, my interest never went beyond brief speculation.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you might still be driving it today, had you bought it - and what curiosity value it would have gleaned in the meantime. And imagine if it had been called Mongoose Civique? You surely couldn't have resisted it - but the owner wouldn't have wanted to get rid of it either, so the situation would never have arisen.
DeleteA sufficiently droll collector might have purchased a Mongoose Civique, and parked it next to a Shelby Cobra. My own preference might have been for the Silver Sword.
ReplyDeleteI did notice "chaparral" among the later suggestions. The company Chaparral made race cars over about thirty years starting in the 1960s, and had some success in North American racing. I don't know whether the founders had read the "Ford Correspondence", but tend to doubt it.
(The Shelby Cobra, by the way, was originally an Aston-Martin with a big Ford motor, later a beefed-up Ford Mustang.)
Yes, I liked the Silver Sword, but mainly because it reminded me of Ian Serraillier's book. The car names that intrigue us these days include one called Mist, which, when you see it on German roads, seems an odd idea, the Daihatsu Charade - no, thanks I want a real car, not something pretending to be a car - and, of course, the Pajero, which allegedly means wanker in Mexican slang.
DeleteWell, for many years Toyota has sold the Cressida. For about twenty-five years, Cadillac has sold the Escalade SUV--amusing since the snide sometimes refer to SUVs alss "urban assault vehicles."
DeleteAnd since you mention German, the military High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) is as often called Hummer as Humvee.